Passikoff is a world-renowned leader in the development of predictive marketing metrics and the founder and president of Brand Keys, Inc., a brand marketing consultancy with a track record of achieving big brand success for its various clients. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor at New York University
In essence, marketing creates or increases demand for whatever is offered. For decades, those primarily responsible for marketing focused on “The Four Ps”: product, price, place, and promotion. According to Passikoff, three Cs–customer engagement, customer expectations, and customer loyalty–have “taken the place” of the four Ps. Obviously, effective marketing must take all of them into full account, but in what order? Passikoff asserts that knowing how to measure, understand, and then predict the three Cs must come first. Without that knowledge, it really makes no difference what the given product is, how much it costs, where and how it can be obtained, how it is promoted, etc. Companies such as Google, Toyota, Starbucks, and Apple recognized long ago how important it is to measure, understand, and (most important of all) predict or at least anticipate customer preferences, especially given the fact that these preferences inevitably change.
How to do that? First, determine what you need to know. Passikoff suggests answering these five basic questions:
Next, use market research (guided and informed by Passikoff’s advice) to obtain the answers. Of special interest to many executives is what he has to say about the Brand Keys approach to measuring brand equity-based loyalty and the importance of Carl Jung’s theory of interpersonal attachments to that approach: “The strongest relationships would be developed when powerful ‘locks’ were established between individuals on both emotional and objective bases. The locks needed to be opened by the specific characteristics or traits of each person in the relationship–keys. These traits (keys) must mutually complement the other individual’s needs.” Passikoff and his Brand Keys associates saw the relevance of Jung’s theory to the attachments which exist between and among consumers and brands whenever there is a high degree of brand loyalty.
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